Open .NET with Geoffrey Huntley (The .NET Core Podcast

Episode 94 - Open .NET with Geoffrey Huntley - of The .NET Core Podcast was released on March 18th, 2022. This article contains an embedded player and a partial transcription of the episode.

For a full transcription, see the following page: https://dotnetcore.show/episode-94-open-dotnet-with-geoffrey-huntley/

Embedded Player

Partial Episode Transcription

Hello everyone and welcome to THE .NET Core Podcast. An award-winning podcast where we reach into the core of the .NET technology stack and, with the help of the .NET community, present you with the information that you need in order to grok the many moving parts of one of the biggest cross-platform, multi-application frameworks on the planet.

I am your host, Jamie “GaProgMan” Taylor. In this episode, I talked with Geoffrey Huntley about how the Open .NET project could help lead to greater, and faster innovation within the .NET community via community ownership - something other languages and frameworks have adopted.

Along the way we discuss some of the controversy surrounding some of the key decisions in the .NET space from 2021. We chose to discuss these topics in a positive manner, attempting to bring them to light and allowing for a constructive discourse on how any future issues could be avoided. I ask that you take our discussion in the spirit in which it is intended: one of support and constructive feedback.

So let’s sit back, open up a terminal, type in

dotnet new podcast

and let the show begin.

Jamie

Thank you ever so much for being on the show, I really appreciate it. We’re in completely different time zones on the opposite ends of the world. I’m in the UK, and you’re somewhere in deepest Australia. So I appreciate that. You’ve had to sort of juggle your day around to fit me in. So I do apologize for that. But I also thank you ever so much.

Geoff

No problem, Jamie, thanks for having me on, there’s so much we need to talk about, like, there’s been a whole bunch of events that’s happened in the .NET space. And I hope to like kind of bring people up to speed of some of the things that have happened. So people can understand why the community has been upset. People will say it’s just drama. Well, that’s one way to dismiss how people validly feeling about something they love.

Jamie

Sure, yeah. We’ll definitely have to discuss that. Because it’s quite important. I feel like, it’s good to be able to criticize something that you enjoy, or like or have positive feelings for, because then you can sort of see it from both sides. Or you can say, hey, you know, for instance, I’m very keen on video games. I’m very happy to say I love this video game. But it’s got some problems, you know, and I feel like having that discussion is it’s a nice balanced discussion. And like you say, there’s some very important things that are happened when this episode goes out last year, because we’re putting this out in 2022. Right at the beginning, so a new year new start, let’s talk about these things. But before we can get to those, would you mind giving the listeners a really quite brief introduction to yourself a little bit of sort of color information about yourself, so we know who you are, and that kind of thing?

Geoff

Sure. I’m Jeff used to be a Microsoft MVP. Then I put my MVP award in the literal shredder - I actually put it in the shredder. The thing is about, like an open platform open source programming language, why do you need a closed boys club? Like and why do we even have this close boys club anyway? Te program started turning into,. "can you please help us advocate for Azure?" And it degraded into, "here is all the content that we publish this week in Azure, maybe you might use it for your YouTube syndication." And we start seeing these incoming generations of people in the community.

And when you look at some of their contributions, it’s, well, they got a large amount of people on YouTube, they got a large amount of people on Twitter. Now there are a lot of people in the MVP program who are amazing, freaking amazing. So just because I don’t find value in the program doesn’t mean it’s not valuable to you. Right, don’t take this as a personal thing, right. So just didn’t like the shape of the program, so I quit.

So before the MVP program, I was open source maintainer for quite a few projects in the .NET ecosystem. These days, I don’t write .NET at all, I still love .NET. And I’ve left the .NET ecosystem. So this is another thing. So one of the things that happened in the .NET space recently, we actually had someone resign from the .NET Foundation. And they cited diversity of thought is the reason they left. They cited that specifically they were looking for an inclusive board of directors, which sounds great. But the the person who resigned actually cited that, well, we just got all Microsoft fanboys here, we’ve got people who are in the MVP program, or people who want to work at Microsoft. So that person quit from from a diversity of four point of view, about myself, yeah, open source maintainer for quite a long time in the .NET space, made a lot of friends along the way. And I generally mean that. And these days, I don’t do .NET much anymore. But at the same time, that puts me in a unique position where I see all the different programming languages out there outside the .NET ecosystem and see where they’re excelling. And I see where .NET is not excelling.

Jamie

Sure, I can understand that. And it’s always important to have a look around at the other. Imagine that we’re doing physical manufacturing, or do physical engineering, the old phrase of all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? And so if the only tool in your toolbox is .NET, you’re going to approach things in a .NET way, in the same way, that if all of the tools you have are Python, you can approach it our Python way, right? Or JavaScript or rust or go or whatever, right. And so it’s my personal opinion is quite important to every so often just look around, see what’s happening, right? Personally, I’m learning a little goal in my in my own spare time, just because I’m like, Hey, what’s this goal language all about? Let’s give it a try, right? Because otherwise, like you say, I’ll always attack the same problems in the same way. And it may be that I’m trying to solve a problem in a way that isn’t, I guess, relevant, you know? So for instance, if I’m in C# in .NET. And I attack a problem that requires functional programming, where maybe F sharp or Haskell or you know, any of the other functional languages, they may be more relevant. And so it’s better to even if all you know is the name and the paradigm he uses, because then you can Google that stuff, right? You just got to Google Haskell functional programming, boom, you got 1000s of tutorials, F sharp, functional programming, boom, you got 1000s of tutorials, I’m trying to sort of balance the .NET technologies versus the non .NET technologies there, if that makes sense.

Geoff

Yeah, it does. Well, you completely right. Look around. I don’t know what it’s like for yourself. Like we go back two years ago when I was in Australia, and I was looking around to all the .NET meetups right. There were no one, like very rare to see anyone under 30. There. Right. And like, even see a woman there at a .NET meetup here in Australia doesn’t exist, right. But if you go to any of the meetups outside of the .NET space, they’re getting all the new brains. Right. So what do you see at your meetups, like so you look around, right? And you see problems. And these problems may not necessarily be tooling. It could be mindset of mindshare people aren’t coming into the ecosystem. What happens if people don’t come into the ecosystem?

Jamie

Yeah, exactly. Right, it starts to sort of get stale, I guess. I feel like perhaps JavaScript had this throughout the late 90s into the early 2000s. And then all these new thought processes came along. And now we’ve got Node, we’ve got NPM. We’ve got, you know, express, we’ve got react, we’ve got Angular, whether you think those are good things or bad things. That’s a whole shedload of innovation right there. Right?

Geoff

Yeah, it’s it’s a whole new generation of people looking at things in a different way. Right, rather than a singular way. And this is the way we do it, though. We’ve got lots of young, brilliant minds, in looking at how things are done differently. Now, there are a lot of problems in some of those ecosystems that you mentioned. Like they have a library for, like if something is it to do a quality check if something is no, that’s a library in that ecosystem, they don’t have a good standard library. But you look at what they’re what they’re doing. Like, if you’re a junior software developer right now, and you want a guaranteed job that’s remote, you learn JavaScript, guaranteed, you’re going to get a remote job. If you want a remote job and your .NET developer, is that even possible, they do exist, but a lot of my governments, right, a lot of my government so that there are problems with demographics here.